This report accompanies The Century Foundation’s report “Exact Title TBD: Student Debt and Race in California,” which examines how student debt puts outsized financial burdens on Black and Latino families in California, especially for graduate borrowers and parents.
While California lawmakers rightly draw on national research on student debt and race, the state-specific analyses we conduct in this research can help guide state policy that accounts for the distinct patterns of borrowing in California. In particular, these analyses draw attention to the effects of uncapped Parent PLUS and Grad PLUS loans on California’s families.
In this report, we walk through the details of the data that underlie that report and explain in greater depth what we do and do not know about student debt in California. Our analysis relies on four sources:
We also draw from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the American Community Survey (ACS) to lesser extents.
The structure of this data-focused report mirrors that of the policy-focused report: the charts and tables in the policy report draw from our four primary data sources in the same order that they are presented here. The first figures in the report draw from the FSA Data Center, and they are followed by figures that draw from NPSAS, and so on. This report is not a static PDF: you can toggle between different versions of charts and hover over barcharts and scatterplots to reveal data points.
The code used to produce this document and its charts and tables can be found at this GitHub repository. All data sets used in this report are publicly available, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Census Bureau.
For any questions, please email granville@tcf.org.
The FSA Data Center is a repository of data and statistics on federal student aid, including spreadsheets on student loans reported directly from the National Student Loan Data System. For this analysis we use two files from the FSA Data Center:
For “per capita” measures of student debt and borrowing below, the population for comparison is the estimated total of all California adults aged 18 to 50, using American Community Survey data reflecting calendar year 2021, available here.
| Measure | 50-state median | California value | California rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Federal student loan debt per capita | $10,494 | $7,973 | 6 |
| Federal student loan borrowers per capita | 0.298 | 0.215 | 4 |
| Average federal student loan balance | $34,623 | $37,084 | 40 |
California has the most outstanding federal student loan debt and borrowers of any state, amounting to around 9 percent of the total portfolio.
| Measure | U.S. total | California value | California share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total outstanding federal student loan debt | $1,505,800,000,000 | $141,800,000,000 | 9.4% |
| Total federal student loan borrowers | 41,874,000 | 3,824,000 | 9.1% |
Now we turn to the quarterly data on disbursements. To evade any impact from the COVID-19 pandemic on the data, we examine data from the 2018-19 award year.
| State | Subsidized | Unsubsidized undergraduate | Unsubsidized graduate | Parent PLUS loans | Grad PLUS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CA | 19.0% | 17.0% | 31.8% | 12.8% | 19.4% |
| U.S. | 21.7% | 22.7% | 29.8% | 14.0% | 11.8% |
Text text text.
The statistics in the previous section have all been based on institution-level data. For the most robust information on the relationship between student loan borrowing and race in California, we need student-level data. In the absence of a national student-level data set, we use survey data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS).
NPSAS is the largest federal survey of U.S. college students with a primary focus on financial aid. The study has generally been conducted every four years, most recently in 2016 (NPSAS:16), with separate data sets examining undergraduate and graduate students.
NPSAS data sets have not traditionally been used for state-level analyses, although the sample size for California students can be large enough to produce reliable estimates depending on the query. This past year, a new edition of NPSAS that was designed for state-representative samples was released. Known as NPSAS-AC (Administrative Collection), it draws from student records housed by colleges and the U.S. Department of Education for a sample of 325,000 undergraduates. Representative samples for public 4-year systems are available in NPSAS-AC for 45 states, and representative samples for public 2-year systems are available for 36 states. Thirty states have representative samples for undergraduate students overall. More information on NPSAS-AC can be found here.
In this section we rely primarily on NPSAS-AC, which reflects the 2017-18 year. For analysis of graduate students, we use NPSAS:16 and filter for in-state students in California. (The in-state condition is required for this query.)
These data are accessed using the National Center on Education Statistics’ (NCES) Datalab tool. Every query has a unique table retrieval number that can be used by any user to run the query in Datalab.
Here are some notes.
do you see me?
okay but do you see ME?